Virtualbox - Linux (Host), Windows 7 x64 (Guest) - Gaming

Altonymous

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Jun 15, 2011
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I recently purchased some new components to build my latest gaming machine. My plan was/is to dual boot the machine as I am a developer for a living and spend most of my time in OS X. But with what I do I can just as easily spend my development time in Linux. So my thought was to dual boot the machine and just swap over when I want to game. However, technology has come a long way since I last tried virtualization for gaming and I'm wondering if we've made enough progress for me to give it another shot?

Here are my system specs, what do you think?

Motherboard - ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z
Processor - Intel Core i7-2600K
Hard Drive - OCZ Vertex 3 – MAX IOPS Edition 240GB SATA III MLC SSD
Video Cards - 2x NVIDIA GTX 580 1.5GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0
Memory - 16GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-17000 2133MHz RipjawsX Series (9-11-9-28)
Optical Drive - LG Black 12X BD-ROM Blue-Ray
Power Supply - Corsair Professional Series Gold 850AX

Some things I'm planning on playing..

Star Wars: The Old Republic
World of Warcraft
Skyrim
Battlefield 3
Starcraft II
Guild Wars 2
 
Solution
Both your virtualisation software and processor need to support VT-d which allows the gues to directly access PCI-E hardware.

With Virtualbox? Impossible.

You can play games like Diablo 1 in VirtualBox, for get anything that's not OpenGl.

Last time I tried, Jedi Academy was very laggy...

amdfangirl

Expert
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Both your virtualisation software and processor need to support VT-d which allows the gues to directly access PCI-E hardware.

With Virtualbox? Impossible.

You can play games like Diablo 1 in VirtualBox, for get anything that's not OpenGl.

Last time I tried, Jedi Academy was very laggy...
 
Solution

Altonymous

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Jun 15, 2011
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What virtualization software does?
 

Pyroflea

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Mar 18, 2007
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VT-d requires a supported chipset as well. As far as PCI-e passthrough, video cards generally do not even work with this technology. It is more meant for disk controllers and NICs.
 
Direct access to a dedicated RIAD / SAN controller and a database VM starts to make real sense. Couple that with a dedicated GigE card and you really are rocking. Question is, if you move to VM's to allow transparent movement of machine images between HW platforms where are the big advantages if you then tie it back to dedicated HW? Snapshots are really just a neat full system backup, you're image would need to point to replacement HW of very similar configuration... it's good but in a kind of counter intuative way to the original selling points of using VM's.
 

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